1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of computer system input sensors. More specifically, it relates to the field of computer system input sensors for recognition systems employing natural senses such as sight and hearing.
2. Description of Related Art
Visual and voice signals provide a rich source of input data commonly available in the world. Human beings are able to take advantage of visual and voice data to a degree that computer systems are not. Because of the richness of the input data which visual and voice signals provide, it would be a major advance in the art to provide computer systems with an efficient means for utilizing visual and voice data, and for obviating the many difficulties which attend such uses.
One reason that visual/voice signals are difficult to utilize is that they are often buried in a background of extraneous data superfluous information which is generally irrelevant to the task at hand. For example, syntactic and semantic meaning of a written word are not generally dependent on its size, color orientation, or font style. Human beings are quite adept at filtering out this and other irrelevant material; computer systems, however, must first filter out the irrelevant material and then engage in some form of recognition to assign meaning to the available data.
One possible approach to recognition is for the computer system to record all possible input patterns of input data which have meaning, and to compare incoming input data with these stored patterns to detect a meaningful input. While this method does accomplish its goal of detecting meaningful inputs, it is generally wasteful both of computer storage space and of computer processing power. Another possible approach to recognition is for the computer system to record only certain representative patterns of input data which have meaning, and to engage in a pattern matching procedure to determine the best fit between the input data and the set of meaningful inputs. While this method does accomplish its goal of detecting meaningful inputs, it can be subject to difficulty when the input visual signal differs greatly in size or orientation, or when the input voice signal differs greatly according to speaker.
The present invention obviates these problems by concentrating attention on the ratios of input feature data, rather than the raw feature data itself. In the case of voice data, this has the advantage of eliminating distinctions in the input data which are based on who is speaking, rather than on what is being spoken. In the case of visual data, this has the advantage of erasing distinctions in the input data which are based on orientation, size, or precision of data.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide an improved method for visual and voice input feature recognition.
It is another object of the present invention to provide an improved device for calculating ratios of raw feature data.
These and other objects of the present invention will be clear after an examination of the drawings, the description, and the claims herein.